Dave Caolo

As of April, there is a new Facebook privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” that shares your data with non-Facebook websites. It’s enabled by default. To disable it, go to account > privacy settings > apps. Click websites > instant personalization and de-select allow.

Additionally, here’s an independent and open tool for scanning your Facebook privacy settings.

The location of the Post button on the compose screen sucks. It’s entirely too easy to accidentally hit it while typing. Other apps like Twitterrific have it in the far corner away from the keyboard.

If this is the only thing addressed in the next version, I’ll be thrilled.

A great article from Time Magazine, explaining why Facebook’s greatest demographic is middle-aged people with kids … people like me. Two highlights from the article:

Facebook is for old people because

7. We have children. There is very little that old people enjoy more than forcing others to pay attention to pictures of their children. Facebook is the most efficient engine ever devised for this.

5. We’re lazy. We have jobs and children and houses and substance-abuse problems to deal with. At our age, we don’t want to do anything. What we want is to hear about other people doing things and then judge them for it. Which is what news feeds are for.

Read the rest. It’s great.

One of the new features of iPhoto ’09 is Facebook integration. With “just a few clicks” as they say, you can export your pictures to Facebook with tagging, face recognition and other data intact. It’s all quite simple and easy from what I’ve observed in the demos. Those of you with iPhoto ’08 who’d like to have this functionality now can check out the iPhoto-to-Facebook plugin.

I installed it on my MacBook pro earlier today (I’m running iPhoto 7.1.5), and it worked perfectly. To use it, first select the photos you want to send to Facebook. Next, choose “Export” from the File Menu.

The Export Window appears, complete with new Facebook tab. From here it’s rather self-explanatory. First, log into Facebook by clicking the “Login” button, which opens a browser window. Once that’s done, return to iPhoto. Next, you can add captions and choose the album you want to receive your photos, or create a new one.

The face recognition is the cool part. Just click on your subject’s face, and a drop-down menu appears listing all of your Facebok friends. A click adds the appropriate tag to a given photo. Neat.

Of course, this is a one trick pony and not a substitute for iPhoto ’09, but if Facebook export is a feature you’re just itching to get your hands on, try this plugin.

Check out the gallery below for setup and use of this plugin.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]